We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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In response to overwhelming popular demand (Julian Taylor can be a bit overwhelming sometimes) here is the text of the Marie Antoinette International Dead Liberty Award for the year 2005, which has been awarded by the Libertarian Alliance to Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and which I featured yesterday in one of these photographs.
Click on this:
I hope you (Julian Taylor) can read that okay, and that it need not be typed in, again.
So, since we are on the subject of Mugabe, how are things in Zimbabwe these days? Well, this story says quite a lot:
Harare, Zimbabwe, 11/17 – A magistrates court in Zimbabwe Thursday dropped corruption charges against President Robert Mugabe`s nephew, two weeks after his high profile arrest on suspicion of graft involving billions of dollars.
Leo Mugabe and his wife Veronica were arrested on charges of illegally selling flour on the local market and exporting it to Mozambique.
Trade in wheat and flour, both of which are in short supply here, is controlled and exports are banned to preserve stocks for the local market.
No evidence, according to the magistrate. I do not suppose that lack of evidence is usually much of a problem, in Zimbabwe nowadays. But this case must have been rather different.
I wonder how Robert Mugabe himself feels about this. I do not assume that he will automatically side with his nephew. As I wrote here, a while ago, I was briefly acquainted with another relative of his, and I can report that the Mugabe family is not the proverbial big happy one. They do not all stick together. They quarrel. And Robert Mugabe is easily stubborn enough and self-righteously cruel enough to throw a relative to the wolves, if he decided that this was the right thing for him to do, just as he has decided that wrecking Zimbabwe is the right thing for him to do and will stubbornly continue with that, until death or ruin stops him.
In other words, this Libertarian Alliance prize will change nothing in Zimbabwe, nothing at all. But, future recipients of the award may perhaps be influenced by it.
The whole issue of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize in 1932 has always pissed me off. It just rankles that he got away with it, so the least we can do is blacken the bastard’s name posthumously for the sake of the millions of dead Ukrainians he lied about.
Now that Harold Pinter has won a Nobel Prize for literature, I guess the tradition of lionising men of letters who are apologists for mass murdering leftists is still alive and well.
Want to make your voice heard on the issue of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize? Take a look at Cyber Cossack (and check out their great site banner) and if you are in the NY area, consider lending your hand to a bit of activism.
Better late than never.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) the issue of trade justice will be topical. Free-market NGO Global Growth is looking for volunteers in London who would be willing to help with a stunt outside the French Embassy. If you are free in the middle of the day tomorrow, e-mail your details to info at global-growth.org. Please include your mobile number.
Reporters without Borders has produced a useful handbook for blogging in an unfree environment. We will be adding a sidebar link to this useful resource which has some technical tips that may be of interest to people in places where Big Brother tries to controls everything you read.
It can be purchased or downloaded for free from here.
The guide to dissident blogging
James Waterton of the Daily Constitutional sees the need for more hardcore activists to spread the word for classical liberal values… and he also sees the need for more people to read his excellent articles. We agree with him on both counts
I was having a chat today with two friends about the nature of a market society. Both guys are intelligent, open minded and lacking ideological zeal. After talking about this and that, the discussion turned into me defending the free market of commerce and culture. Neither of them are heavily interested in politics, however they both articulated their positions with cognisance and we had a good discussion.
Because of the above discussion and the assumptions my friends held of the free market, I came to realise that – as enthusiasts of the free market – we do very little to actively promote the cause and its benefits. We hope our continually improving lives do the talking for us. Trouble is, these benefits can be twisted by people who do not agree with us. We are getting rich, says Green Left, at the expense of those in the third world and/or in our underclass. This is rubbish, of course, but it is an easily grasped concept, no matter how misguided. A group like Resistance goes out to a lot of schools to talk to students about the beauty of socialism. It is rich pickings for them there, because the simplistic truths of socialism appeal to minds that are neither sullied with the realities of human nature nor self-supporting adults. It is not hard to make a teenager feel bad about our society. Ask them if they lead a comfortable life. Show them a few pictures of starving African children. Let them join the dots. Child’s play. → Continue reading: We need a classical liberal ‘Resistance’ movement
Hate the idea of ID cards? Do not keep your views to yourself.
I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge.
– Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator at PledgeBank
Deadline is 9th October 2005, 2,934 people have signed up, 7066 more are needed. Those in the UK, please sign up.
Incoming email from Sean Gabb:
Dear Brian,
I know this is not the best time or place for the debate – I believe much of the audience wants to leave afterwards to wander up and down outside Parliament waving candles or some such. I hope to be abed by then. But it may be an important event. If you cannot attend, please circulate.
Regards,
Sean
I could attend but do not want to. I am going through a quietist phase just now. But I am happy to pass it all on:
Free Trade v Fair Trade
A Debate Organised by Christian Aid
St Margaret’s Church, Westminster (Near Parliament)
Friday 15th Aril 2005 – 11.50pm to 1am
What is best for poor countries? Do they need global free trade in goods and services? Or is this just a cover for western neo-imperialism? Do such countries instead need fair trade – a system in which local producers are encouraged to develop without competition from larger foreign countries?
Come along and listen, and have your say.
Chair: Alan Beattie, The Financial Times
For Free Trade: Dr Sean Gabb, Libertarian Alliance; Alex Singleton, Globalization Institute
For Fair Trade: Martin Khor, Third World Network; Prosper Heoyi, Oxfam
For further details, contact:
Leo Bryant
Campaign Events
Christian Aid
020 7523 2264
camtemp3@christian-aid.org
Sean adds the following:
Assuming other speakers will give permission, Sean Gabb will video the whole event, and will make DVDs available. He will certainly record his own contribution.
This flyer was put together by Sean Gabb on the basis of limited information. He had nothing to do with what he considers the dreadful time and place of the debate, but is told that around 700 people will attend.
Good luck gentlemen. I look forward to viewing the DVD.
Another of my friends has succumbed to the inevitable and started a weblog, this time my Austin, Texas-based pal Alan R. Weiss. Alan is a tremendous dynamo of a character; he is a former vice president of the Free State Project and still closely involved in that venture. Alan is also a businessman an innovator who has harnessed cutting-edge venture capital financing techniques to accelerate the writing achievements of noted libertarian author and campaigner, L. Neil Smith. My girlfriend and I spent a wonderful long weekend in Austin staying with Alan’s great family last September during a marathon trip around the country. I can strongly recommend Austin as a place to visit.
Oh, and he is also a big Firefly fan. Does the guy have no flaws?
Last night I attended a fascinating talk about the libertarian movement in Spain, hosted by Tim Evans in Putney, and given by Gabriel Calzada, who had been known to me before last night only as the author (maybe – I was unsure) of this essay.
The message Gabriel delivered to a small but very attentive group of London libertarians can be briefly summarised as follows: the Spanish libertarian movement is extraordinarily big and is doing extraordinarily well.
Gabriel started his talk with some history, concerning the Salamanca school of Natural Law theorists, mentioning the names of Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco de Suarez, and Juan de Mariana. Here is a famous Mariana quote:
Taxes are commonly a calamity for the people and a nightmare for the government. For the former they are always excessive; for the latter they are never enough, never too much.
But that was a very long time ago, and that kind of thing only influenced modern Spain indirectly, via its influence on the Austrian school.
It became very clear as the evening went on that the enormous Spanish anarchist movement that flourished about a century ago is crucial to any understanding of the current Spanish libertarian movement. Anarchism as a political force in Spain was eventually decapitated by the supposed allies of the anarchists, the Communists, for being insufficiently obedient to Stalin, but the climate of opinion – what we here at Samizdata call the meta-context – of anarchism lived on in Spain. Whereas the typical political question in other countries is something like: How shall we govern ourselves?, in Spain the question is: How shall we be free? How, as it were, do you do freedom? With a question like that, it makes sense that the libertarian answer to that question (one word summary: property) would attract a mountain of enthusiastic attention, and it has.
Perhaps another reason for the dramatic impact of libertarianism in Spain is that Spain has, until challenged by the libertarians, been intellectually dominated by Communism. Anarchism having been wiped out, and anti-Communism having become so tainted by Francoism, that left the lefties ruling the media roost in Spain, in the form of such mass media giants as El Pais, the biggest national newspaper in Spain, which makes the Guardian seem to Gabriel like a centrist/liberal kitten by comparison. Lots of libertarians are converts from leftism, and Spain is very full of people who have been raised in a leftist manner but who are looking for different answers.
It may also have helped the rise of libertarianism, although this was not mentioned by Gabriel or in discussion, that Spain is now economically so vibrant, compared to earlier times.
Gabriel, interestingly, preferred to focus on the achievements of two individuals: Jesus Huerta de Soto, and Federico Jimenez Losantos. Huerta is the key scholar, and Jimenez is a key media performer, and both are men of “contageous enthusiasm”, a phrase Gabriel used several times.
He also mentioned the vital role that the Internet has played in this story. Again, summarising brutally, whereas the Communists owned the old media, the libertarians own the Internet, to the point where the Communists are getting seriously worried.
Gabriel mentioned two internet sites in particular, liberalismo.org (scholarship) and Libertad Digital (current affairs). Both have astronomical hit rates, of the order of a million a month (sorry but I am bad at numbers). When those Communists type any Spanish ‘issue’ into their search engines, time and time again, the first few hits are libertarian analyses. No wonder they are so anxious, and have been saying that something ought to be done about controlling the Internet.
Jimenez is also doing extraordinarily well on the radio.
I could attempt to go on, on the basis of my scribbled and inadequate notes, but I will leave it at that for now, hoping that Gabriel will regard this report as better than nothing. (Antoine Clarke, also present, might like to comment about all the things I missed, and maybe clarify some of the numbers involved in this story, people, hit rates, etc.) I will add only that whereas there are now no Spanish libertarian sites which also present themselves to the English speaking world in English, this is apparently about to change. There will soon be an English language site devoted to Spanish affairs, written by Spanish libertarians. Gabriel has promised to inform us as soon as it gets going.
Altogether a fascinating, and most encouraging evening.
Afterwards we had a late supper at Tim and Helen’s, which is where I took this photo of Gabriel.
Hayek (on the left in black and white) is saying: what is that greenery doing in front of me? Gabriel is a great enemy of greenery, having recently penned a denunciation of the Kyoto Treaty, so particular apologies for that blemish.
Oh, and did I mention that Gabriel Calzada has also just been made a Professor at the University of Madrid?
If ideas have consequences, and they definitely do, then Spanish libertarianism is going to have some very big consequences indeed.
The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.
The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious – and growing – civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.
Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.
The state is not your friend.
The No2ID launch was held in the basement bar of The Corner Store in Covent Garden, a spacious restaurant/pub catering for the tourist trade. The attendance was good, with more and more interested parties walking in as the clock crept past midday until the small room was overflowing.
The two speakers were Neil Gerrard, Labour MP for Wolverhampton, and Debbie Chay, the Chair of Charter88, representing the civil liberties movement, now repackaged as civil libertarianism, to distinguish itself from the Real Thing. Both provided telling anecdotes on the idiocies and dangers that an ID system would represent. Nevertheless, there was a telling gap in their analysis. Both were unable to provide a convincing story as to why the government was introducing this measure. Without understanding the motives behind the development of the ID scheme, it will prove far more difficult to halt or reverse.
I also had the pleasure of meeting Guy Herbert, a name not so unfamiliar here. His own fear was that the ID scheme will depend upon the establishment of databases that will require a far greater intrusion into the private lives of citizens if the state is to monitor them effectively.
My conclusions on the meeting were hopeful and fearful. As with any new campaigning organisation, there is a lot of work to be done in order to achieve the aim of defending civil liberties in the UK. Mark Littlewood, their National Coordinator, quipped that there were few organisations which could boast the Libertarian Alliance and Globalise Resistance as supporting organisations. Yet, as I talked with a couple of campaigners from the Left, they proved unresponsive to my thesis that they had to attract the middle classes: people who read the Daily Mail or supported the Countryside Alliance, if they wished to succeed. Since most of the activists were Left rather than Right in orientation, this may skew the activities and demands of No2ID.
Secondly, the lack of analysis may prove a boon for libertarians. Neil Gerrard asked “why anyone would wish to introduce ID cards?”. The answer is complex: strategies to control the individual by the state, which has an increasing need to obtain information (once deemed private) in order to further this end. Boondoggles such as the evil machinations of private capitalists who could make vast profits from any contracts awarded by government should remain a sideshow. They will not convince people fearful of a terrorist bomb. Libertarianism provides the strongest resource for crafting a message that can appeal to all of those affected: from men with the wrong colour of skin who will be stopped even more often and asked for some form of ID to the yound, single professional who never encounters the state, until this drops through their letterbox.
However, if there is a bomb in the United Kingdom on the scale of Madrid or the WTC, all bets are off. The government will argue that a terrorist atrocity requires the development of the surveillance state, backed up by authoritarian laws.
Crossposted to White Rose
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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